Age old question - b&w or colour? Do your own version.

@sunnyside_up

Can I nick this image as a retouching skills test for work? It's almost perfect for a test: Subtle skin tones... freckles... spots... bit of flaky skin, grey background to check white balance... subtle but dark shadow detail. Basically.... it's a very easy image to mess up if you don't know what you're doing.

Any objections? It wil only be on the college network... not online anywhere (unless a student blogs their digital practice). You'll be attributed of course and the image will have a copyright notice applied. Essentially.... its' already plastered all over the net now anyway, as we've all had a go at it, and all hosted it on a variety of external sites :)
 
Pookeyhead said:
@sunnyside_up

Can I nick this image as a retouching skills test for work? It's almost perfect for a test: Subtle skin tones... freckles... spots... bit of flaky skin, grey background to check white balance... subtle but dark shadow detail. Basically.... it's a very easy image to mess up if you don't know what you're doing.

Any objections? It wil only be on the college network... not online anywhere (unless a student blogs their digital practice). You'll be attributed of course and the image will have a copyright notice applied. Essentially.... its' already plastered all over the net now anyway, as we've all had a go at it, and all hosted it on a variety of external sites :)
Click to expand...
No problem, David. It's fine. I have a release on it. :)
 
Thanks everyone for all your takes on edits. Really interesting to see how everyone works... a lot of similarities... but I think I'd have to say that overall the image itself doesn't really lend itself to a black and white conversion as it is, (I think someone mentioned that above) but some really lovely edits done with it... don't know what everyone else thinks...

@minnnt - I see a similar processing style there with your colour version ;) I like! Nice warm feel to it!
@onform - love what you've done with her eyes!
@Pookeyhead - lovely conversion... fab zoomed in. Works better I think as a tight facial crop...?
@davekiddle - Thanks Dave - Lovely conversion. I like the lower contrast to it.
@Lez325 - Fab stuff Les... nice clean edit.

I know there is a thread somewhere about 'how would you edit this', but I thought this exercise was quite interesting. For you PP people and portrait people, might be an interesting exercise to do again soon... What do you think?
 
Thanks Ian @Morbid ! Really crisp and clean edits. Fantastic! i quite like the B&W conversion here...
 
Ok - here's my effort.

I thought the hair was the key thing so I cropped to allow a greater proportion of the image to be given to that - and I wanted to include all the hair.

I then tried to increase contrast in just the hair on the LHS (looking at the image) and also lighten up the hair and face on the RHS. As regards the top I started off trying to tone the colours down in the coloured version before converting to B&W but then forgot to continue toning it down in B&W (doh!!)

17009153327_cc32e29f0f_b.jpg


She is probably a bit to central in the image but I didn't want to cut her off at the elbows. For me this crop would work better with a long-sleeved top.

Which of the various options - colour and B&W does SHE prefer?
 
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I am a B&W fan, if I can put it in monochrome I will but this picture is better in colour -- although I do like Sir SR's rendition. TBH I think there is something missing from the colour version too but, unhelpfully, I just can't pin down what it is. I am thinking that I agree with a previous poster in that the smile just doesn't reach the eyes and would have been better taken without the smile at all. The model has photogenic eyes but the smile detracts from them; a sterner, or more neutral look from the model would have worked better and also a monchrome version would have worked well with that.

As I type this the edit by Sir SR is still visible and I like it more and more; yes, very good.
 
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